Some 110 Bhutanese objects and 330 films of the country's ritual dances never before seen in the West will go on display in The Dragon's Gift: The Sacred Arts of Bhutan at the Honolulu Academy of Arts.
The curatorial first got started in the fall of 1997, when Ephraim Jose, a conservator of Asian and Himalayan art, had a 24-hour layover in Paro, Bhutan, on his way home from a vacation.
Jose's guide arranged for a tour of the National Museum. When the museum's director learned that Jose was a master conservator, he asked him to restore some thangkas - traditional painted or embroidered scroll paintings - in the collection. Jose promised he would do so someday.
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
Returning to San Francisco, he approached Terese Tse Bartholomew, curator of Himalayan art at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, about organizing an exhibition of Bhutanese art. She tried for several years but had no luck securing assent from the Bhutanese government.
Finally, in 2003, she took the idea to Little, who was the curator of Asian art at the Art Institute of Chicago and was about to decamp to a new post as director of the Honolulu Academy of Arts. Little was intrigued. There had never been a comprehensive art-historical exhibition of Bhutanese art, and there was so little published on the subject that it was hard to imagine what such a show would look like.
Little rewrote the exhibition proposal and sent it to Bhutan's government, suggesting that it include not just works of art but also documentation of the ritual dance called cham. Original fieldwork would be performed by art curators and filmmakers and financed through grants to the Honolulu Academy. He received approval from the government in 2004.
Around that time, Little received a phone call from John Johnston, a former art intern he had worked with who now had a master's degree in art history and specialized in Chinese Buddhist art. Better yet, Johnston was temporarily out of a job.
Little realized he had an ideal candidate. Johnston was a practicing Buddhist and was willing to move to Bhutan for a couple of years and learn Dzongkha.
From March 2005 to March 2007, Johnston lived in Bhutan full time, learning how to handle sacred images and developing a strategy for "how to conduct ourselves," he said. He, Bartholomew, Little and a Bhutanese expert in Buddhist iconography, Reda Sobky, reviewed snapshots of thousands of artworks at the government's Department of Culture before heading out into the field to locate them.
One major find was Seula Gonpa, a monastery in western Bhutan, which is now a school for young monks and seven hours by foot from the nearest road. There, Johnston was shown 75 to 100 thangkas, each more beautiful than the last. Yet many of the works were in terrible condition after years of being venerated in front of butter lamps emitting thick acrid smoke and stacked in infested bins.
Johnston returned to the capital with photographs of his discoveries. Before making selections for the show, curators assembled a group of Bhutanese monks, lamas and scholars to discuss the iconography. "Books could not help us because nobody had written about Bhutanese iconography," Johnston said.
While Johnston was doing his fieldwork, Little enlisted Joseph Houseal, a choreographer and dance preservationist. Houseal and Gerard Houghton, a cameraman, made two early trips to Bhutan to witness the cham dances without shooting any film. Then they developed some noninvasive production techniques that would allow them "to make a clear historical record of the structure of the dance and the shape of the choreography," Houseal said.
Last week, Viola Zhou published a marvelous deep dive into the culture clash between Taiwanese boss mentality and American labor practices at the Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) plant in Arizona in Rest of World. “The American engineers complained of rigid, counterproductive hierarchies at the company,” while the Taiwanese said American workers aren’t dedicated. The article is a delight, but what it is depicting is the clash between a work culture that offers employee autonomy and at least nods at work-life balance, and one that runs on hierarchical discipline enforced by chickenshit. And it runs on chickenshit because chickenshit is a cultural
By far the most jarring of the new appointments for the incoming administration is that of Tseng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) to head the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF). That is a huge demotion for one of the most powerful figures in the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Tseng has one of the most impressive resumes in the party. He was very active during the Wild Lily Movement and his generation is now the one taking power. He has served in many of the requisite government, party and elected positions to build out a solid political profile. Elected as mayor of Taoyuan as part of the
Moritz Mieg, 22, lay face down in the rubble, the ground shaking violently beneath him. Boulders crashed down around him, some stones hitting his back. “I just hoped that it would be one big hit and over, because I did not want to be hit nearly to death and then have to slowly die,” the student from Germany tells Taipei Times. MORNING WALK Early on April 3, Mieg set out on a scenic hike through Taroko Gorge in Hualien County (花蓮). It was a fine day for it. Little did he know that the complex intersection of tectonic plates Taiwan sits
When picturing Tainan, what typically comes to mind is charming alleyways, Japanese architecture and world-class cuisine. But look beyond the fray, through stained glass windows and sliding bookcases, and there exists a thriving speakeasy subculture, where innovative mixologists ply their trade, serving exquisite concoctions and unique flavor profiles to rival any city in Taiwan. Speakeasies hail from the prohibition era of 1920s America. When alcohol was outlawed, people took their business to hidden establishments; requiring patrons to use hushed tones — speak easy — to conceal their illegal activities. Nowadays legal, speakeasy bars are simply hidden bars, often found behind bookcases